sales karate

Dream 1

I was in some space like a lobby for a hotel or theater, or possibly some fancy, old restaurant where there are various levels separated from each other by a few stairsteps. The atmosphere was calmly bright and active. A lot of people may have been milling about.

I was with my oldest nephew. But he was young, maybe only five or six years old. He was either practicing martial arts or else giving an acting performance about the martial arts. He stood at the top of a staircase, facing away from the steps. A man stood facing my nephew, a couple meters away. The man was probably tall, bald, white, and wiry.

Apparently the story was that the man facing my nephew would come at him. But my nephew would somehow cause the man, who was much bigger than he, to fall down the steps. Possibly this performance had been done before. But my nephew may have been attacked that time, or may simply have managed to make the man fall down the steps. So now my nephew was worried he wouldn't succeed. But I was sure he'd been fine.

I tried to figure in my head how exactly my nephew would get the man thrown down the steps. I thought he might throw the man. But then I realized he might just step out of the way at the right moment and let the man fly down the steps on his own momentum.

Now I was in my nephew's place. But I wasn't my nephew. My nephew was still around. But it was like I stepped in for him, possibly to make sure the man fell down the steps.

The man came at me. I'm honestly not sure what happened next. I may have caught the man and used his momentum to throw him. Or I may have just let him fall.

But whatever I did, the man flew up in the air, like he'd been thrown. He flipped over, so that his head was pointed straight down. Then he descended straight down, either onto the floor or onto the last step before the floor. He landed on his head. He bounced, then landed on his back a few meters away. I knew the man had likely broken his neck. I wasn't sure I'd meant things to end like that.

I ran down the steps to meet the man. He was surrounded by a bunch of people now. His feet may have been at the very edge of a platform for a train, like a train was pulling up directly into this restaurant- or hotel-like area.

I looked at the man. I may have held his head in my hands. The man looked up through woozy, slitted eyes. I could tell the man was either paralyzed or at the brink of death.

I was now in some dark area that was like an indoor area of a hotel, with a lot of elevated planters filled with plants and some separated, gazebo like areas that people could sit in. The area was mostly dark. But lights shone on some of the structures, possibly because people were using those structures at the moment.

I was carrying something that was supposed to be work-related papers. But it was actually a woman's blouse, or some kind of top. It was a dull blue, possibly with paisley designs on it. It was probably sleeveless. It had a satiny feel. And it may have been stained with something like chocolate.

I walked up to two old coworkers from a job I left in March. One was one of the tech leads: an older, white woman, overweight, her face a little worn out, with darkish blonde hair. The other was the head of sales: a bald, white man about my height, but wider and more muscular.

I may have realized at this point that my "work papers" were a sales pitch. I may have come down to this area to practice my sales pitch. I'd run into the tech woman and sales guy by accident. This was inconvenient. I didn't want them to start paying attention to me and stop me from taking care of my task.

But I may also have had to take care of some other task with the tech woman and sales guy. So I may have thought I'd just take care of it now, while they were in front of me. As I approached them, possibly to present my "work papers," I had an edge of the blouse crammed in my mouth, and I was sucking and slobbering on it.

The tech woman may have taken some actual papers from me. Or she may have acknowledged that I'd brought the papers. But she sort of made it clear that she didn't really want to talk to me. And as soon as she could, she started hurrying away, possibly saying something to shove me off onto the sales guy.

But the sales guy didn't want to talk to me, either. He noticed that I had my "work papers" in my hands. He remembered that I was studying a sales pitch. He may have said at some point (i.e. before the dream) that he'd help me study the pitch. But he hadn't really wanted to, and I hadn't really wanted him to.

The sales guy apologized to me for not having helped me learn my pitch. I possibly didn't say anything in return, not wanting the guy to gauge any of my reactions in a way that would make him want to help me.

But then the sales guy may have asked me for my "work papers." I didn't want to give them to him -- possibly because I didn't want him to take away the sales pitch before I learned it (he'd probably wanted to stop me from learning it); but also because I really did know that I was just holding a slobbery, chocolate-stained blouse in my hands, and I didn't want the sales guy to notice this. So I didn't know what I should do.

the vanished woman; old woman charon

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom of an apartment or of a mutli-story house. The bedroom was dim and small, with dull, wood floors and a small bed that probably had a pink bedspread over it.

I was a strong, young man with olive complexion, dark hair, and a little bit of stubble on my face. I was in the bedroom with a woman who may have been beautiful, though she may have been twice my age. She may actually have been a family member, or the mother of a group of my friends who were downstairs.

I had gotten into an argument with the woman over something, possibly some crime the two of us had taken part in. I felt like the woman was going to get me in trouble by revealing something about the crime. I may have been planning to kill her to get rid of the evidence.

I traced my feet around the bed, moving clockwise around the bed from the head of the bed, down around the foot of the bed, and up just a step or two back toward the head of the bed.

The woman now stepped near the bed. She didn't know -- maybe I hadn't, either! -- that my feet had actually cut into the floor, like in cartoons. The traced area was ready to collapse. I must have had an idea of this, because I'm pretty sure I told the woman not to step any closer.

But the woman did step forward and fall through the floor. The bed, the section of floor, and the woman all vanished through the floor. I looked into the hole. I'd expected to hear a crash or something. But there was nothing. And the hole was shallow, like there was another floor only one or two meters down. Everything had really vanished!

I hurried downstairs, hoping to find the spot where the woman had landed. I met the woman's children, who were probably all about the same age as I/the young man. I don't know whether the family actually was angry at me for letting their mother die, or whether they even suspected me of being involved in it. But I was afraid they were angry. They all seemed kind of savage and capable of really harming me.

I was trying to justify what had happened to the woman. But the conversation between me and the others went to other topics. The hole in the floor, I learned, also had something to do with demons. So perhaps demons had drawn the woman to the hole in the floor. The woman was definitely in danger of demons right now, wherever she was.

Something else I learned from our conversation, which continued as we walked down a big complex of old, institution-style staircases and balconies, was that the woman had actually said something that had tempted fate, or tempted the spirits, to pull her into wherever she now was. She had something that had to do with keeping her distance from spirits, something like always staying two steps or five steps away from something.

As people -- including, now, for some reason, my grandma P -- continued to tell me this story, in an almost pitying tone of voice, I, continuing to walk down the staircase, began playing with the bannister, running my fingers along a knob of white-painted wood.

We ended up down at the bottom of the staircase, in a fluorescent-lit basement. I had expected to find the woman down here. I could even visualize her, laying wrapped up in a blanket, even cluttered on either side by stuff that had fallen with her through the hole in the floor.

Dream #2

I walked out of a living room and into a hallway, at the back of a group of older family members, probably including my mother, my grandma P, and my step-grandmother.

We had all been planning on how to take care of some older woman in our family who was having physical troubles. I had understood that I had been assigned certain tasks, and I had adapted my thoughts to the anticipation of taking care of these tasks.

But now that we were walking through the hallway, I learned that I had been assigned a whole different group of tasks. The responsibility I had accepted, even come to look forward to, was now replaced by a whole different set of responsibilities, which were things I felt could have been assigned to a child. I felt like it was being implied that I was no more than a little child.

I had only found out about these changes as they'd filtered through the conversation my relatives were having with each other. But I found out that my mother had actually been the one to make these changes. She'd made the changes, and she hadn't told me a thing!

We all ended up in a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was kind of small, narrow, and flimsy. But something about it also felt like a great library, like the Morgan Library.

The rest of my relatives had kind of dispersed, leaving just me and my mother in the room. My mom may have been trying to have a nice conversation with me. But she may also have been gloating at me, trying to needle me with the fact that she had changed plans on me without telling me anything.

I got extremely angry. Suddenly I was floating a bit above the ground. A book was also floating in front of me. Ostensibly the book was an edition of Dickens' Little Dorrit. But it was much thinner than any edition of Little Dorrit could be. And the covers and all the pages were made of some kind of backing and white fabric. The white fabric was all emroidered with quaint illustrations, giving the book the look of a folk art cushion and a child's book.

As I looked at this book, calmly entranced by its strange, Christmasy beauty, I was think/talk/yelling at my mom. I brought up some instance where a relative, possibly my grandma P, had needed her help. But some decision my mom had made had gone wrong. I yelled at my mom, "You! You really -- fucked -- it -- up!"

I knew that that would hurt my mom and get back at her for her having changed plans on me. But now that I'd done it, I felt bad. I'd gone too far. I worried that I'd permanently damaged my mom's emotions. I felt really terrible.

I was now in an SUV with some co-workers from my present job, probably including MM and SC. I was sitting in a backseat. We were driving through a quaint residential area. We drove up to a property that was fenced around with a solid, white wall of fence that had some kind of green ivy draping over it.

We stopped at the gate. It was understood that I needed to head in and hand a payment to an old woman who lived at the house. This payment was partly something I'd owed from the past. But it was almost like this payment was a kind of rite of passage, something that would make me part of my group of co-workers.

But I either didn't have the money or else was so low on money that paying the fee would really put me in trouble financially. I tried not to let on about this. But somehow SC found out. She, and probably the rest of my co-workers, were a little disappointed in me when they found out. I knew I'd be held in lower esteem because of this mistake I'd made -- not having enough money.

My co-workers, or maybe just SC, who was probably driving the car, may have handed me a twenty-dollar bill, or even a wad of twenty-dollar bills. I now had enough money to give to the old woman.

I was now standing before the door. But, where before the house had been in a kind of tight, wall-fenced place, it now stood out on some wide, sunny lawn, maybe even a wide valley.

Two old women opened the door. One woman stood tall. The other woman may have been very short, or hunched over, or even sitting in a wheelchair. She was kind of fat, very pale, very baggy-faced, with pale blue eyes and thin, white hair. She wore a peach-tan, satiny nightgown. She was the woman I was supposed to give my money to.

The woman didn't really seem concerned with my money. She was talking in a rambling manner that was uncanny and spooky. (I want to say now that it was autonomous or beyond my control -- I'm not sure why, or even what that would mean.)

The woman wanted me to stay to keep her company. She may have been offering me dinner in return. But something about the woman, the degree of her illness, made me realize that it wouldn't be good, either for me or for the woman, for me to stay with her.

I may still have wanted to stay with the woman. But I was now sitting on something like a child's tricycle combined with some (not sure what) aspect of a Radio Flyer wagon. The wagon was being pulled by a yellow and blue rope attached to the front. I was being pulled away from the house and out of the valley.

I kept trying and trying to pull myself back toward the woman. But the rope kept pulling me farther and farther away. Moving through the rolling valley, I was surprised by its vastness. I really felt like things had changed -- for the better (?). I saw a few small groups of beautiful people, mostly beautiful, little girls, playing in the valley.

Getting toward the edge of the valley I now saw that the people who were pulling the rope attached to the wagon were the co-workers who had been in the car with me, in particular SC and MM. They stood on a clear boundary of lands. The area they stood in was more like a pine forest, with trees and dusty, needle-strewn ground. I knew that my co-workers were doing what was best for me. But I still kept reaching back toward the house and the old woman.

ohio city

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I went with my step-grandmother to Ohio. Apparently we were on vacation together. Ohio may just have been one big city, or else we may have been in one big city in Ohio.

My step-grandma and I walked around together for a while. The sky was dark, but the city was lit well. The city actually looked like a stage version, or even a comic book version, of a city. The buildings were large, but they all looked boxy, bright and fake.

We passed some large, stately, stone building that looked like a McKim, Mead and White building. Something about that building felt hollow. Maybe the doors were barely hanging on the hinges, or maybe they felt fake, somehow. We then may have gone into a restaurant that was almost totally empty of furniture.

My step-grandma then had to go off on some task. She may have been heading to a meeting or conference. She gave me the job of finding a hotel.

I thought I was finding a hotel for just myself, and that I would meet my step-grandma the next morning. I didn't have a car, so I'd have to walk everywhere. I wanted to get a hotel close to all the sights I wanted to see tonight and close to where I assumed I'd meet my step-grandma the next day. This seemed to be some spot in the middle of town.

I opened a big, paper map showing the town (or all of Ohio). The town looked a lot like Manhattan, except that its bottom end spread outward into a huge land mass. But the upper part of the town was just like Manhattan, even with little extensions coming off the west and east sides to show shipping piers.

I knew the name of the hotel I wanted to stay at. It was one of a chain of famous luxury hotels. The name was familiar to me, and was possibly a real name from waking life, but I can't remember it now.

The land on the map was a solid orange, with very few features, maybe just a few lines for major roads. The map also had little circles with letters. The circles were also orange, though they may have been outlined in blue. The letters were probably white. Each circle pointed out a hotel. A little legend gave the name of the hotel corresponding to each letter.

I knew the hotel I wanted to stay at had the letter C. I looked for the letter C and found it, I thought, at the bottom of the map, way in the section of land mass that flowed out of the main part of town (or of Ohio).

I knew that was way too far for me to walk. I couldn't stay there. But then I looked closer. The letter was really Cb, not C. Apparently, this hotel had two chains. The main hotel for this chain, the regular C, I found, was just about in the middle of the main part of town. So I could stay there.

I was now sitting on a wide, enormous, stone staircase with my step-grandma. As I looked up, the staircase seemed to be indoors: the staircase was bordered by stone columns and had a ceiling from which glowed a bright, incandescent light. But when I looked to my right, toward my step-grandma, we seemed to be outside, able to see all the buildings and the dark sky.

My step-grandma told me she was going to stay at the hotel with me. I hadn't thought about this before. But now that she mentioned it, it made a lot of sense to me.

I was relieved. It had seemed inconvenient for me to stay at the hotel alone, maybe because of the cost. But now I had the idea that my step-grandma would pay for the hotel. This made staying at the hotel a lot more convenient.